Yet there it was all the same.
He looks like the husband I don’t have.
And the worst part was...he really did. In fact, the feeling was so strong she started to worry he somehow was, and she’d just forgotten him. He died during the thing that had happened, and she’d gone so mad with grief she’d blocked him out.
And now he’d returned to haunt her.
It certainly felt as if her heart were haunted, seeing him standing there like every happy movie husband she’d ever seen. Thinking of all the dreams she’d had of the life she would one day lead, full of all those wonderful clichés.Hey, honey, you got the paper, he would say, and she would pass it to him. Then they would sit at the breakfast table and eat some eggs and drink some orange juice while she read the funnies and he read the sports section. Then afterward, they might go visit a market of some kind.
That was the way it went, wasn’t it?
Or at least, that was the way it went for ordinary people. The ones who had not had all those things dismantled one by one, along with their hopes for a happy career in something normal and their plan to maybe visit other places in the world.When I’m older I will travel, she’d imagined, in that taking-it-for-granted way kids always did.
Oh, how she wished she’d never taken her future joy for granted.
“You okay, Alice?”
How could she say no? She had to say yes. He would never understand all that, and even on the off chance he might she wasn’t sure how to explain it. The whole thing sounded too insane and besides...if she spoke she knew what would happen. She could already feel that sting behind her eyes.
So she nodded. She nodded.
“I can take this off, if you want,” he said, then seemed to pause before adding, “if it belonged to someone else, that is.”
No it’s okay, she thought.He only died in my imagination.
“It doesn’t belong to anyone else.”
“You sure? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Of course I’m sure,” she said, but the shock of him echoing some of her thoughts again made her voice a little shaky. She had to turn her back and focus on other things, only these other things were just as ridiculous. She didn’t even have any plates to put her rubbish food on. Instead she had to use a colander that had been here since she moved in, and it kept leaking crumbs of crackers and cakes out of all the little holes.
Plus the sides of it were so steep everything kept falling onto everything else. By the time she got it to the table it was just a big jumble of squirty cheese and squashed baked goods, with a sprinkling of Cheetos over the top. No one in their right mind would have eaten it, or even sat down with someone as clearly unhinged as she.
Yet he did just that.
He dug in as though she’d ordered him a four-course meal from a Michelin-starred restaurant. And when he finally commented, it was only to suggest ways of combining all the terrible elements. “If you squeeze the Ring Ding between two Doritos it’s like having a sandwich,”he said, and relief flooded through her.
He wasn’t going to ask again.
He wasn’t going to ask about anything. Not about her reaction to the robe or the almost kiss or her lack of correct food and crockery. He was content to just allow things to go on as they were, as calm and easy as a summer breeze. Neither of them had to worry about their problems; their problems did not exist here.
There was only him feeding her crackers covered in buttercream, with a dozen ridiculous assurances that they would be nice. “I think the garlic really adds something,” he said, and suddenly everything else just faded away. He was good at making things fade away—though it was only after she’d made him laugh that she realized.
She was good at it too.
This was what they were doing.
They were somehow making it through.
* * * * *
It took a couple of days for her to realize she should probably find him something to wear. She couldn’t fault her lack of social graces, however. He didn’t seem to give a damn about social graces. He only cared about hanging out with her, and after a while that was all she cared about too.
The robe no longer seemed haunted. It seemed like something comforting. He wasn’t Holden Stark anymore, supreme ruler of the movie universe. He was Bernie, who wandered around her house in fluffy terrycloth. And if that terrycloth occasionally slipped a little here or there and she maybe saw too much—well, that was okay.
She could handle it.
She could sort of handle it.
